Starry Starry Night
by Archangela
Summary: This world was never meant for one as beautiful as you. Draco/Hermione angst.


AN: Lovely song. So full of angst. *wipes away tear*

Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter™, nor did I write _Starry, Starry Night. _I wish I did, though.

**Starry, Starry Night**

_Starry, starry night_

_Paint your palette blue and gray_

            The stars were dim outside as Hermione walked the halls of the deserted Malfoy Manor, searching for the one room, where all secrets would unfold, and a story of a boy would finally be told. 

_Look out on a summer's day_

_With eyes that know the darkness in my soul..._

            She found it, and she stepped inside, fingers brushing over the engraved dragon on the door of ebony. Once in, she looked around, sadness welling up in her eyes as hot tears of compassion and memory.

            It was an elegant room, tasteful in its furnishings, and beautiful in design, yet it seemed purely for display, as if the richly made bed had never been slept in, or the windows never opened. 

            As if a young man had never lived there.

            All his short life.

            Hermione stepped into the room, heading for the back wall, stopping only to touch a gilt-framed picture on the desktop. She pressed her palms to the back wall, calling back her Auror training and skills. One whispered word, and the secret panel slid open, and Hermione went in for the very first time.

            The picture that lay on the desktop was a Muggle one, unmoving, and frozen in time. It was of a young girl, with bright eyes and a sweet smile, the youthful version of the woman in Draco's room right now.

_Shadows on the hills_

_Sketch the trees and the daffodils_

_Catch the breeze and the winter chills_

_In colors on the snowy linen land.___

            Hermione could feel it in the room. He was still here. This was where he lived. Where he laughed. Where he loved. Where he loved her. 

            For at the other end of the small room stood easels and canvases draped with spattered muslin cloths, and arranged neatly on the tiny chest-of-drawers beside the door was a plethora of used but well-taken care of brushes and paints.

_Now I understand_

_What you tried to say to me_

            She walked around the tiny studio, touching the covered paintings and looking out the small window at a breathtaking view of the Malfoy grounds. And as she took in the landscape bathed in cold starlight, she called back the last memory she ever had of Draco.

            _"Hermione."___

_            "Yes, Draco?"_

_            "My room holds a great secret. Possibly the greatest one of my life." _

_            She had laughed then, assuming it was all a joke, but his eyes were serious as he took her hands in his. "Please. Don't laugh. I want you to find it."_

_            "What do you want me to find?"_

_            "My room."_

_            "But..."_

_            "Sh. The password is..."_

_            He looked away, into the cold blue mountains and the steel grey sky._

_            "Hermione."_

_            Silence. And Hermione repeated his words to herself as Draco Disapparated. "The password is Hermione."_

            Now she stood in his studio, in the room he had lived in all his life, her forehead on the cold windowpane, and hot tears slipping down her cheek. "I'm sorry." She whispered.

_And how you suffered for your sanity_

_And__ how you tried to set them free:_

            She scrubbed the tears away with an angry hand, and reaching out, pulled the cover off the nearest painting. It fell away with a soft whisper, and revealed a beautifully made family portrait of the Malfoys, sitting close to each other, yet so far. 

            Hermione stared, at the identical cold grey eyes, the sleek blond hair and the formal expressions of rigid superiority etched onto their faces. She looked the longest at Draco, at his beautiful profile and his narrow eyes. But her heart broke at the cold glare on his face. She ran her fingers over the oil painting, feeling the ridges and bumps of the paint. "Don't do that. You look so beautiful when you smile." 

            "Who painted this?" she asked no one, glancing down at the right-hand corner of the painting, and tears blurred her vision as she registered the spidery black scribble. 

            "Draco, you bastard. You never told me you painted."

_They would not listen; they did not know how --_

_Perhaps they'll listen now._

            She was silent, admiring the cold beauty of the family portrait of a family now torn apart. And with a sigh like the saddest of breezes, she turned to pull off the muslin cloths on the other paintings, all masterpieces waiting to be discovered.

_Starry, starry night_

_Flaming flowers that brightly blaze_

            Cold stone angels in snowy graveyards, wings spread, yet unable to fly. A dark figure at the gate of the Malfoy Manor, one pale hand resting on the iron bars. A silhouette of a crumbling church, religion gone to waste, sanity falling into dust. 

            Hermione took it all in, the beauty, the stark pain and the dim melancholy that hung in the room like his scent of rain and grass and stardust. "It's all so beautiful." she whispered. "So beautiful. Yet so painful."

_Swirling clouds in violet haze_

            She turned to the last two paintings on the shelf beside her. She had saved them for last, because the tight black cords wrapped around the silk coverings must have meant something. 

            Something.

            Hermione unbound the first painting with shaking hands. The silk fell away, and lay on the ground like a puddle of water. 

            And she found his self-portrait.

_Reflect in Vincent's eyes of china blue_

            Fresh tears welled up at the sight of that beautiful face, with its soft blond hair and grey eyes. Eyes that pierced right through her soul and told her things she didn't want to hear, or need to know. 

            "I loved you, Hermione." 

            _I loved you... but once. _

Her hand stroked the painting, the smooth marble skin captured perfectly, the delicate lips and the pointed chin. 

            _You were so beautiful._

_Colors changing hue_

_Morning fields of amber grain_

            She set it aside, placing it carefully on top of a cushion of muslin cloth, appraising it through tears. Hermione whispered a Preservation Spell over it, and turned to the last painting.

_Weathered faces lined in pain_

_Are soothed beneath the artist's loving hand.___

            She reached for the painting, unbound it and let the cloth fall. 

            "Draco..." 

            Her own bright eyes shone up at her from the rough canvas of the painting, and Hermione touched the frame of his last masterpiece reverently, taking comfort in the fact that he stayed true to life and captured her hair the way it was, bushy, messy.

            _He always liked my hair. _she thought quietly, looking down at her portrait.

            And his last words echoed to her. "I'd like to paint you someday, Hermione." 

            And she mockingly replied that she would never pose nude. 

_Now I understand_

_What you tried to say, to me_

_And_ how you suffered for your sanity__

            But she was beautiful. He had told her that. And she never believed him, laughing it off as flattery and lies. But now, as she stood in that dusty, aged room, staring down at the painting of herself made by the only one who had ever truly loved her...

            "He was right all along."

            A tear fell onto the painting, running down from the cheek of the real Hermione to spill onto the neck of the one captured in oil paints.

            "I _am beautiful. I _am _capable of loving... and of being loved..."_

_They would not listen_

_They did not know how_

            She closed her eyes in pain. "What now? When the only man I could ever have loved is gone forever?"

_Perhaps they'll listen now_

            Silence. And the fading memory of that young man's death in the midnight snow.

_For they could not love you_

_But still_, your love was true__

            "_Nobody understands you. Nobody believes in you." He could feel the hot tears stinging his cheeks as he stumbled into the freshly fallen snow, the dagger heavy in his hands. _

            Standing under a night scattered with stars so cold, his breath in white puffs and tears freezing on his cheeks, he balled his fists, those painter's hands, and screamed into the night.

            _"I loved you, Hermione... I loved you, but once."_

_And_ when no hope was left inside__

_On that starry, starry night_

            "But you will never understand," he gasped, the winter air searing his lungs, as the stars twinkled as coldly as the icicles glazing the Manor roof. "how I loved you..."

            He glared up at a barred window, shut tight against the rest of the world. _His parents._

            "You." he whispered. "You would never understand either... I loved you too. As any _normal," he spat the word out like it was poison on his tongue. "As any normal boy would have loved his parents... "_

            "But you never loved me back, did you?"

            Eyes as cold as the biting wind narrowed fiercely, and his hand clenched at the dagger, knuckles as pale as the finest marble already as white as the snow swirling around his feet.

            "No..." he finally whispered. "No, you didn't."

_You took your life as lovers often do--_

            "And neither did you, Hermione." he drew a hand against his eyes, noting the fiery numbness spreading up his arm. "But I loved you." The dagger in place. Against his chest.

            Somewhere far away, he could hear the door slamming open and his mother's anguished voice. He smiled, cold as the steel sky.

            "Goodbye, then."

            He made no sound as he fell, but there was his mother's keening wail, against the howl of the winter wind and the music of the once-silent stars...

_But_ I could've told you, Vincent:__

            Hermione fell to her knees, hugging the painting to her chest. "Draco..." she sobbed, rocking back and forth on the cold stone floor. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry..."

            "If only I knew. If only I cared..." Tears dampened her collar in warm spots of salt. "If only..."

**_This world was never meant_**

**_for_****_ one as beautiful as you…_**

****

"They would never understand." she gasped between sobs. "Never... understand." 

            "You were just too beautiful... no one could understand you, Draco..."

            "Not even... me."

_Now I think I know_

_What you tried to say, to me_

_And_ how you suffered for your sanity__

_And_ how you tried to set them free:__

_They would not listen; they're not listening still--_

_Perhaps they never will._


End file.
